"What! will the aspiring blood of Lancaster
Sink in the ground? I thought it would have mounted";
though as mere rhetoric it belongs to the same class.[131]
It might be defended as a bit of ghastly humor characteristic of the
speaker. But at any rate it is not without precedent in the two greater
Greek tragedians. In a chorus of the _Seven against Thebes_ we have:--
[Greek: en de gaia.
Zoa phonoruto
Memiktai, _karta d' eis' omaimoi_.]
And does not Sophocles make Ajax in his despair quibble upon his own name
quite in the Shakespearian fashion, under similar circumstances? Nor does
the coarseness with which our great poet is reproached lack an Aeschylean
parallel. Even the Nurse in _Romeo and Juliet_ would have found a true
gossip in her of the _Agamemnon_, who is so indiscreet in her confidences
concerning the nursery life of Orestes. Whether Raleigh is right or not
in warning historians against following truth too close upon the heels,
the caution is a good one for poets as respects truth to Nature. But it
is a mischievous fallacy in historian or critic to treat as a blemish of
the man what is but the common tincture of his age. It is to confound a
spatter of mud with a moral stain.
But I have been led away from my immediate purpose. I did not intend to
compare Shakespeare with the ancients, much less to justify his defects
by theirs. Shakespeare himself has left us a pregnant satire on
dogmatical and categorical aesthetics (which commonly in discussion soon
lose their ceremonious tails and are reduced to the internecine dog and
cat of their bald first syllables) in the cloud-scene between Hamlet and
Polonius, suggesting exquisitely how futile is any attempt at a cast-iron
definition of those perpetually metamorphic impressions of the beautiful
whose source is as much in the man who looks as in the thing he sees. In
the fine arts a thing is either good in itself or it is nothing. It
neither gains nor loses by having it shown that another good thing was
also good in itself, any more than a bad thing profits by comparison with
another that is worse. The final judgment of the world is intuitive, and
is based, not on proof that a work possesses some of the qualities of
another whose greatness is acknowledged, but on the immediate feeling
that it carries to a high point of perfection certain qualities proper to
itself. One does not flatter a fine pear by comparing it to a fine peach,
nor learn what a fine peach is by tasting ever so many poor ones. The boy
who makes his first bite into one does not need to ask his father if or
how or why it is good. Because continuity is a merit in some kinds of
writing, shall we refuse ourselves to the authentic charm of Montaigne's
want of it? I have heard people complain of French tragedies because they
were so very French. This, though it may not be to some particular
tastes, and may from one point of view be a defect, is from another and
far higher a distinguished merit. It is their flavor, as direct a
telltale of the soil whence they drew it as that of French wines is.
Suppose we should tax the Elgin marbles with being too Greek? When will
people, nay, when will even critics, get over this self-defrauding trick
of cheapening the excellence of one thing by that of another, this
conclusive style of judgment which consists simply in belonging to the
other parish? As one grows older, one loses many idols, perhaps comes at
last to have none at all, though he may honestly enough uncover in
deference to the worshippers before any shrine. But for the seeming loss
the compensation is ample. These saints of literature descend from their
canopied remoteness to be even more precious as men like ourselves, our
companions in field and street, speaking the same tongue, though in many
dialects, and owning one creed under the most diverse masks of form.
Much of that merit of structure which is claimed for the ancient tragedy
is due, if I am not mistaken, to circumstances external to the drama
itself,--to custom, to convention, to the exigencies of the theatre. It
is formal rather than organic. The _Prometheus_ seems to me one of the
few Greek tragedies in which the whole creation has developed itself in
perfect proportion from one central germ of living conception. The motive
of the ancient drama is generally outside of it, while in the modern (at
least in the English) it is necessarily within. Goethe, in a thoughtful
essay,[132] written many years later than his famous criticism of Hamlet
in _Wilhelm Meister_, says that the distinction between the two is the
difference between _sollen_ and _wollen_, that is, between _must_ and
_would_. He means that in the Greek drama the catastrophe is foreordained
by an inexorable Destiny, while the element of Freewill, and consequently
of choice, is the very axis of the modern. The definition is conveniently
portable, but it has its limitations. Goethe's attention was too
exclusively fixed on the Fate tragedies of the Greeks, and upon
Shakespeare among the moderns. In the Spanish drama, for example, custom,
loyalty, honor, and religion are as imperative and as inevitable as doom.
In the _Antigone_, on the other hand, the crisis lies in the character of
the protagonist. In this sense it is modern, and is the first example of
true character-painting in tragedy. But, from whatever cause, that
exquisite analysis of complex motives, and the display of them in action
and speech, which constitute for us the abiding charm of fiction, were
quite unknown to the ancients. They reached their height in Cervantes and
Shakespeare, and, though on a lower plane, still belong to the upper
region of art in Le Sage, Molière, and Fielding. The personages of the
Greek tragedy seem to be commonly rather types than individuals. In the
modern tragedy, certainly in the four greatest of Shakespeare's
tragedies, there is still something very like Destiny, only the place of
it is changed. It is no longer above man, but in him; yet the catastrophe
is as sternly foredoomed in the characters of Lear, Othello, Macbeth, and
Hamlet as it could be by an infallible oracle. In Macbeth, indeed, the
Weird Sisters introduce an element very like Fate; but generally it may
be said that with the Greeks the character is involved in the action,
while with Shakespeare the action is evolved from the character. In the
one case, the motive of the play controls the personages; in the other,
the chief personages are in themselves the motive to which all else is
subsidiary. In any comparison, therefore, of Shakespeare with the
ancients, we are not to contrast him with them as unapproachable models,
but to consider whether he, like them, did not consciously endeavor,
under the circumstances and limitations in which he found himself, to
produce the most excellent thing possible, a model also in its own
kind,--whether higher or lower in degree is another question. The only
fair comparison would be between him and that one of his contemporaries
who endeavored to anachronize himself, so to speak, and to subject his
art, so far as might be, to the laws of classical composition. Ben Jonson
was a great man, and has sufficiently proved that he had an eye for the
external marks of character; but when he would make a whole of them, he
gives us instead either a bundle of humors or an incorporated idea. With
Shakespeare the plot is an interior organism, in Jonson an external
contrivance. It is the difference between man and tortoise. In the one
the osseous structure is out of sight, indeed, but sustains the flesh and
blood that envelop it, while the other is boxed up and imprisoned in his
bones.
I have been careful to confine myself to what may be called Shakespeare's
ideal tragedies. In the purely historical or chronicle plays, the
conditions are different, and his imagination submits itself to the
necessary restrictions on its freedom of movement. Outside the tragedies
also, the _Tempest_ makes an exception worthy of notice. If I read it
rightly, it is an example of how a great poet should write allegory,--not
embodying metaphysical abstractions, but giving us ideals abstracted from
life itself, suggesting an under-meaning everywhere, forcing it upon us
nowhere, tantalizing the mind with hints that imply so much and tell so
little, and yet keep the attention all eye and ear with eager, if
fruitless, expectation. Here the leading characters are not merely
typical, but symbolical,--that is, they do not illustrate a class of
persons, they belong to universal Nature. Consider the scene of the play.
Shakespeare is wont to take some familiar story, to lay his scene in some
place the name of which, at least, is familiar,--well knowing the reserve
of power that lies in the familiar as a background, when things are set
in front of it under a new and unexpected light. But in the _Tempest_ the
scene is laid nowhere, or certainly in no country laid down on any map.
Nowhere, then? At once nowhere and anywhere,--for it is in the soul of
man, that still vexed island hung between the upper and the nether world,
and liable to incursions from both. There is scarce a play of
Shakespeare's in which there is such variety of character, none in which
character has so little to do in the carrying on and development of the
story. But consider for a moment if ever the Imagination has been so
embodied as in Prospero, the Fancy as in Ariel, the brute Understanding
as in Caliban, who, the moment his poor wits are warmed with the glorious
liquor of Stephano, plots rebellion against his natural lord, the higher
Reason. Miranda is mere abstract Womanhood, as truly so before she sees
Ferdinand as Eve before she was wakened to consciousness by the echo of
her own nature coming back to her, the same, and yet not the same, from
that of Adam. Ferdinand, again, is nothing more than Youth, compelled to
drudge at something he despises, till the sacrifice of will and
abnegation of self win him his ideal in Miranda. The subordinate
personages are simply types; Sebastian and Antonio, of weak character and
evil ambition; Gonzalo, of average sense and honesty; Adrian and
Francisco, of the walking gentlemen who serve to fill up a world. They
are not characters in the same sense with Iago, Falstaff, Shallow, or
Leontius; and it is curious how every one of them loses his way in this
enchanted island of life, all the victims of one illusion after another,
except Prospero, whose ministers are purely ideal. The whole play,
indeed, is a succession of illusions, winding up with those solemn words
of the great enchanter who had summoned to his service every shape of
merriment or passion, every figure in the great tragi-comedy of life, and
who was now bidding farewell to the scene of his triumphs. For in
Prospero shall we not recognize the Artist himself,--
"That did not better for his life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds,
Whence comes it that his name receives a brand,"--
who has forfeited a shining place in the world's eye by devotion to his
art, and who, turned adrift on the ocean of life in the leaky carcass of
a boat, has shipwrecked on that Fortunate Island (as men always do who
find their true vocation) where he is absolute lord, making all the
powers of Nature serve him, but with Ariel and Caliban as special
ministers? Of whom else could he have been thinking, when he says,--
"Graves, at my command,
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth,
By my so potent art"?
Was this man, so extraordinary from whatever side we look at him, who ran
so easily through the whole scale of human sentiment, from the homely
commonsense of, "When two men ride of one horse, one _must_ ride behind,"
to the transcendental subtilty of,
"No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change;
Thy pyramids, built up with newer might,
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;
They are but dressings of a former sight,"--
was he alone so unconscious of powers, some part of whose magic is
recognized by all mankind, from the school-boy to the philosopher, that
he merely sat by and saw them go without the least notion what they were
about? Was he an inspired idiot, _vôtre bizarre Shakespeare_? a vast,
irregular genius? a simple rustic, warbling his _native_ wood-notes wild,
in other words, insensible to the benefits of culture? When attempts have
been made at various times to prove that this singular and seemingly
contradictory creature, not one, but all mankind's epitome, was a
musician, a lawyer, a doctor, a Catholic, a Protestant, an atheist, an
Irishman, a discoverer of the circulation of the blood, and finally, that
he was not himself, but somebody else, is it not a little odd that the
last thing anybody should have thought of proving him was an artist?
Nobody believes any longer that immediate inspiration is possible in
modern times (as if God had grown old),--at least, nobody believes it of
the prophets of those days, of John of Leyden, or Reeves, or
Muggleton,--and yet everybody seems to take it for granted of this one
man Shakespeare. He, somehow or other, without knowing it, was able to do
what none of the rest of them, though knowing it all too perfectly well,
could begin to do. Everybody seems to get afraid of him in turn. Voltaire
plays gentleman usher for him to his countrymen, and then, perceiving
that his countrymen find a flavor in him beyond that of _Zaïre_ or
_Mahomet_, discovers him to be a _Sauvage ivre, sans le moindre étincelle
de bon goût, et sans le moindre connoissance des règles_. Goethe, who
tells us that _Götz von Berlichingen_ was written in the Shakespearian
manner,--and we certainly should not have guessed it, if he had not
blabbed,--comes to the final conclusion, that Shakespeare was a poet, but
not a dramatist. Châteaubriand thinks that he has corrupted art. "If, to
attain," he says, "the height of tragic art, it be enough to heap
together disparate scenes without order and without connection, to
dovetail the burlesque with the pathetic, to set the water-carrier beside
the monarch and the huckster-wench beside the queen, who may not
reasonably flatter himself with being the rival of the greatest masters?
Whoever should give himself the trouble to retrace a single one of his
days, ... to keep a journal from hour to hour, would have made a drama in
the fashion of the English poet." But there are journals and journals, as
the French say, and what goes into them depends on the eye that gathers
for them. It is a long step from St. Simon to Dangeau, from Pepys to
Thoresby, from Shakespeare even to the Marquis de Châteaubriand. M. Hugo
alone, convinced that, as founder of the French Romantic School, there is
a kind of family likeness between himself and Shakespeare, stands boldly
forth to prove the father as extravagant as the son. Calm yourself, M.
Hugo, you are no more a child of his than Will Davenant was! But, after
all, is it such a great crime to produce something absolutely new in a
world so tedious as ours, and so apt to tell its old stories over again?
I do not mean new in substance, but in the manner of presentation. Surely
the highest office of a great poet is to show us how much variety,
freshness, and opportunity abides in the obvious and familiar. He invents
nothing, but seems rather to _re_-discover the world about him, and his
penetrating vision gives to things of daily encounter something of the
strangeness of new creation. Meanwhile the changed conditions of modern
life demand a change in the method of treatment. The ideal is not a
strait-waistcoat. Because _Alexis and Dora_ is so charming, shall we have
no _Paul and Virginia?_ It was the idle endeavor to reproduce the old
enchantment in the old way that gave us the pastoral, sent to the garret
now with our grandmothers' achievements of the same sort in worsted.
Every age says to its poets, like a mistress to her lover, "Tell me what
I am like"; and he who succeeds in catching the evanescent expression
that reveals character--which is as much as to say, what is intrinsically
human--will be found to have caught something as imperishable as human
nature itself. Aristophanes, by the vital and essential qualities of his
humorous satire, is already more nearly our contemporary than Molière;
and even the _Trouvères_, careless and trivial as they mostly are, could
fecundate a great poet like Chaucer, and are still delightful reading.
The Attic tragedy still keeps its hold upon the loyalty of scholars
through their imagination, or their pedantry, or their feeling of an
exclusive property, as may happen, and, however alloyed with baser
matter, this loyalty is legitimate and well bestowed. But the dominion of
the Shakespearian is even wider. It pushes forward its boundaries from
year to year, and moves no landmark backward. Here Alfieri and Leasing
own a common allegiance; and the loyalty to him is one not of guild or
tradition, but of conviction and enthusiasm. Can this be said of any
other modern? of robust Corneille? of tender Racine? of Calderon even,
with his tropical warmth and vigor of production? The Greeks and he are
alike and alone in this, and for the same reason, that both are
unapproachably the highest in their kind. Call him Gothic, if you like,
but the inspiring mind that presided over the growth of these clustered
masses of arch and spire and pinnacle and buttress is neither Greek nor
Gothic,--it is simply genius lending itself to embody the new desire of
man's mind, as it had embodied the old. After all, to be delightful is to
be classic, and the chaotic never pleases long. But manifoldness is not
confusion, any more than formalism is simplicity. If Shakespeare rejected
the unities, as I think he who complains of "Art made tongue-tied by
Authority" might very well deliberately do, it was for the sake of an
imaginative unity more intimate than any of time and place. The antique
in itself is not the ideal, though its remoteness from the vulgarity of
everyday associations helps to make it seem so. The true ideal is not
opposed to the real, nor is it any artificial heightening thereof, but
lies _in_ it, and blessed are the eyes that find it! It is the _mens
divinior_ which hides within the actual, transfiguring matter-of-fact
into matter-of-meaning for him who has the gift of second-sight. In this
sense Hogarth is often more truly ideal than Raphael, Shakespeare often
more truly so than the Greeks. I think it is a more or less conscious
perception of this ideality, as it is a more or less well-grounded
persuasion of it as respects the Greeks, that assures to him, as to them,
and with equal justice, a permanent supremacy over the minds of men. This
gives to his characters their universality, to his thought its
irradiating property, while the artistic purpose running through and
combining the endless variety of scene and character will alone account
for his power of dramatic effect. Goethe affirmed, that, without
Schröder's prunings and adaptations, Shakespeare was too undramatic for
the German theatre,--that, if the theory that his plays should be
represented textually should prevail, he would be driven from the boards.
The theory has prevailed, and he not only holds his own, but is acted
oftener than ever. It is not irregular genius that can do this, for
surely Germany need not go abroad for what her own Werners could more
than amply supply her with.
But I would much rather quote a fine saying than a bad prophecy of a man
to whom I owe so much. Goethe, in one of the most perfect of his shorter
poems, tells us that a poem is like a painted window. Seen from without,
(and he accordingly justifies the Philistine, who never looks at them
otherwise,) they seem dingy and confused enough; but enter, and then
"Da ist's auf einmal farbig helle,
Geschicht' und Zierath glänzt in Schnelle."
With the same feeling he says elsewhere in prose, that "there is a
destructive criticism and a productive. The former is very easy; for one
has only to set up in his mind any standard, any model, however narrow"
(let us say the Greeks), "and then boldly assert that the work under
review does not match with it, and therefore is good for nothing,--the
matter is settled, and one must at once deny its claim. Productive
criticism is a great deal more difficult; it asks, What did the author
propose to himself? Is what he proposes reasonable and comprehensible?
and how far has he succeeded in carrying it out?" It is in applying this
latter kind of criticism to Shakespeare that the Germans have set us an
example worthy of all commendation. If they have been sometimes
over-subtile, they at least had the merit of first looking at his works
as wholes, as something that very likely contained an idea, perhaps
conveyed a moral, if we could get at it. The illumination lent us by most
of the English commentators reminds us of the candles which guides hold
up to show us a picture in a dark place, the smoke of which gradually
makes the work of the artist invisible under its repeated layers.
Lessing, as might have been expected, opened the first glimpse in the new
direction; Goethe followed with his famous exposition of Hamlet; A.W.
Schlegel took a more comprehensive view in his Lectures, which Coleridge
worked over into English, adding many fine criticisms of his own on
single passages; and finally, Gervinus has devoted four volumes to a
comment on the plays, full of excellent matter, though pushing the moral
exegesis beyond all reasonable bounds.[133] With the help of all these,
and especially of the last, I shall apply this theory of criticism to
Hamlet, not in the hope of saying anything new, but of bringing something
to the support of the thesis, that, if Shakespeare was skilful as a
playwright, he was even greater as a dramatist,--that, if his immediate
business was to fill the theatre, his higher object was to create
something which, by fulfilling the conditions and answering the
requirements of modern life, should as truly deserve to be called a
work of art as others had deserved it by doing the same thing in
former times and under other circumstances. Supposing him to have
accepted--consciously or not is of little importance--the new terms of
the problem which makes character the pivot of dramatic action, and
consequently the key of dramatic unity, how far did he succeed?
Before attempting my analysis, I must clear away a little rubbish. Are
such anachronisms as those of which Voltaire accuses Shakespeare in
Hamlet, such as the introduction of cannon before the invention of
gunpowder, and making Christians of the Danes three centuries too soon,
of the least bearing aesthetically? I think not; but as they are of a
piece with a great many other criticisms upon the great poet, it is worth
while to dwell upon them a moment.
The first demand we make upon whatever claims to be a work of art (and we
have a right to make it) is that it shall be _in keeping_. Now this
propriety is of two kinds, either extrinsic or intrinsic. In the first I
should class whatever relates rather to the body than the soul of the
work, such as fidelity to the facts of history, (wherever that is
important,) congruity of costume, and the like,--in short, whatever might
come under the head of _picturesque_ truth, a departure from which would
shock too rudely our preconceived associations. I have seen an Indian
chief in French boots, and he seemed to me almost tragic; but, put upon
the stage in tragedy, he would have been ludicrous. Lichtenberg, writing
from London in 1775, tells us that Garrick played Hamlet in a suit of the
French fashion, then commonly worn, and that he was blamed for it by some
of the critics; but, he says, one hears no such criticism during the
play, nor on the way home, nor at supper afterwards, nor indeed till the
emotion roused by the great actor has had time to subside. He justifies
Garrick, though we should not be able to endure it now. Yet nothing would
be gained by trying to make Hamlet's costume true to the assumed period
of the play, for the scene of it is laid in a Denmark that has no dates.
In the second and more important category, I should put, first,
co-ordination of character, that is, a certain variety in harmony of the
personages of a drama, as in the attitudes and coloring of the figures in
a pictorial composition, so that, while mutually relieving and setting
off each other, they shall combine in the total impression; second, that
subordinate truth to Nature which makes each character coherent in
itself; and, third, such propriety of costume and the like as shall
satisfy the superhistoric sense, to which, and to which alone, the higher
drama appeals. All these come within the scope of _imaginative_ truth. To
illustrate my third head by an example. Tieck criticises John Kemble's
dressing for Macbeth in a modern Highland costume, as being ungraceful
without any countervailing merit of historical exactness. I think a
deeper reason for his dissatisfaction might be found in the fact, that
this garb, with its purely modern and British army associations, is out
of place on Fores Heath, and drags the Weird Sisters down with it from
their proper imaginative remoteness in the gloom of the past to the
disenchanting glare of the foot-lights. It is not the antiquarian, but
the poetic conscience, that is wounded. To this, exactness, so far as
concerns ideal representation, may not only not be truth, but may even be
opposed to it. Anachronisms and the like are in themselves of no account,
and become important only when they make a gap too wide for our illusion
to cross unconsciously, that is, when they are anacoluthons to the
imagination. The aim of the artist is psychologic, not historic truth. It
is comparatively easy for an author to _get up_ any period with tolerable
minuteness in externals, but readers and audiences find more difficulty
in getting them down, though oblivion swallows scores of them at a gulp.
The saving truth in such matters is a truth to essential and permanent
characteristics. The Ulysses of Shakespeare, like the Ulysses of Dante
and Tennyson, more or less harmonizes with our ideal conception of the
wary, long-considering, though adventurous son of Laertes, yet Simon Lord
Lovat is doubtless nearer the original type. In Hamlet, though there is
no Denmark of the ninth century, Shakespeare has suggested the prevailing
rudeness of manners quite enough for his purpose. We see it in the single
combat of Hamlet's father with the elder Fortinbras, in the vulgar
wassail of the king, in the English monarch being expected to hang
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern out of hand merely to oblige his cousin of
Denmark, in Laertes, sent to Paris to be made a gentleman of, becoming
instantly capable of any the most barbarous treachery to glut his
vengeance. We cannot fancy Ragnar Lodbrog or Eric the Red matriculating
at Wittenberg, but it was essential that Hamlet should be a scholar, and
Shakespeare sends him thither without more ado. All through the play we
get the notion of a state of society in which a savage nature has
disguised itself in the externals of civilization, like a Maori deacon,
who has only to strip and he becomes once more a tattooed pagan with his
mouth watering for a spare-rib of his pastor. Historically, at the date
of Hamlet, the Danes were in the habit of burning their enemies alive in
their houses, with as much of their family about them as might be to make
it comfortable. Shakespeare seems purposely to have dissociated his play
from history by changing nearly every name in the original legend. The
motive of the play--revenge as a religious duty--belongs only to a social
state in which the traditions of barbarism are still operative, but, with
infallible artistic judgment, Shakespeare has chosen, not untamed Nature,
as he found it in history, but the period of transition, a period in
which the times are always out of joint, and thus the irresolution which
has its root in Hamlet's own character is stimulated by the very
incompatibility of that legacy of vengeance he has inherited from the
past with the new culture and refinement of which he is the
representative. One of the few books which Shakespeare is known to have
possessed was Florio's Montaigne, and he might well have transferred the
Frenchman's motto, _Que sçais je_? to the front of his tragedy; nor can I
help fancying something more than accident in the fact that Hamlet has
been a student at Wittenberg, whence those new ideas went forth, of whose
results in unsettling men's faith, and consequently disqualifying them
for promptness in action, Shakespeare had been not only an eye-witness,
but which he must actually have experienced in himself.
One other objection let me touch upon here, especially as it has been
urged against Hamlet, and that is the introduction of low characters and
comic scenes in tragedy. Even Garrick, who had just assisted at the
Stratford Jubilee, where Shakespeare had been pronounced divine, was
induced by this absurd outcry for the proprieties of the tragic stage to
omit the grave-diggers' scene from Hamlet. Leaving apart the fact that
Shakespeare would not have been the representative poet he is, if he had
not given expression to this striking tendency of the Northern races,
which shows itself constantly, not only in their literature, but even in
their mythology and their architecture, the grave-diggers' scene always
impresses me as one of the most pathetic in the whole tragedy. That
Shakespeare introduced such scenes and characters with deliberate
intention, and with a view to artistic relief and contrast, there can
hardly be a doubt. We must take it for granted that a man whose works
show everywhere the results of judgment sometimes acted with forethought.
I find the springs of the profoundest sorrow and pity in this hardened
indifference of the grave-diggers, in their careless discussion as to
whether Ophelia's death was by suicide or no, in their singing and
jesting at their dreary work.
"A pickaxe and a spade, a spade,
For--and a shrouding-sheet:
O, a pit of clay for to be made
For such a guest is meet!"
_We_ know who is to be the guest of this earthen hospitality,--how much
beauty, love, and heartbreak are to be covered in that pit of clay. All
we remember of Ophelia reacts upon us with tenfold force, and we recoil
from our amusement at the ghastly drollery of the two delvers with a
shock of horror. That the unconscious Hamlet should stumble on _this_
grave of all others, that it should be _here_ that he should pause to
muse humorously on death and decay,--all this prepares us for the
revulsion of passion in the next scene, and for the frantic confession,--
"I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers
Could not with all _their_ quantity of love
Make up my sum!"
And it is only here that such an asseveration would be true even to the
feeling of the moment; for it is plain from all we know of Hamlet that he
could not so have loved Ophelia, that he was incapable of the
self-abandonment of a true passion, that he would have analyzed this
emotion as he does all others, would have peeped and botanized upon it
till it became to him a mere matter of scientific interest. All this
force of contrast, and this horror of surprise, were necessary so to
intensify his remorseful regret that he should believe himself for once
in earnest. The speech of the King, "O, he is mad, Laertes," recalls him
to himself, and he at once begins to rave:--
"Zounds! show me what thou'lt do!
Woul't weep? woul't fight? woul't fast? woul't tear thyself?
Woul't drink up eysil? eat a crocodile?"
It is easy to see that the whole plot hinges upon the character of
Hamlet, that Shakespeare's conception of this was the ovum out of which
the whole organism was hatched. And here let me remark, that there is a
kind of genealogical necessity in the character,--a thing not altogether
strange to the attentive reader of Shakespeare. Hamlet seems the natural
result of the mixture of father and mother in his temperament, the
resolution and persistence of the one, like sound timber wormholed and
made shaky, as it were, by the other's infirmity of will and
discontinuity of purpose. In natures so imperfectly mixed it is not
uncommon to find vehemence of intention the prelude and counterpoise of
weak performance, the conscious nature striving to keep up its
self-respect by a triumph in words all the more resolute that it feels
assured beforehand of inevitable defeat in action. As in such slipshod
housekeeping men are their own largest creditors, they find it easy to
stave off utter bankruptcy of conscience by taking up one unpaid promise
with another larger, and at heavier interest, till such self-swindling
becomes habitual and by degrees almost painless. How did Coleridge
discount his own notes of this kind with less and less specie as the
figures lengthened on the paper! As with Hamlet, so it is with Ophelia
and Laertes. The father's feebleness comes up again in the wasting
heartbreak and gentle lunacy of the daughter, while the son shows it in a
rashness of impulse and act, a kind of crankiness, of whose essential
feebleness we are all the more sensible as contrasted with a nature so
steady on its keel, and drawing so much water, as that of Horatio,--the
foil at once, in different ways, to both him and Hamlet. It was natural,
also, that the daughter of self-conceited old Polonius should have her
softness stiffened with a fibre of obstinacy; for there are two kinds of
weakness, that which breaks, and that which bends. Ophelia's is of the
former kind; Hero is her counterpart, giving way before calamity, and
rising again so soon as the pressure is removed.
I find two passages in Dante that contain the exactest possible
definition of that habit or quality of Hamlet's mind which justifies the
tragic turn of the play, and renders it natural and unavoidable from the
beginning. The first is from the second canto of the _Inferno_:--
"E quale è quei che disvuol ciò che volle,
E per nuovi pensier sangia proposta,
Si che del cominciar tutto si tolle;
Tal mi fec' io in quella oscura costa;
Perchè pensando consumai la impresa
Che fu nel cominciar cotanto tosta."
"And like the man who unwills what he willed,
And for new thoughts doth change his first intent,
So that he cannot anywhere begin,
Such became I upon that slope obscure,
Because with thinking I consumed resolve,
That was so ready at the setting out."